Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  Heike rolled over in her bed to face me. “Your aunt is very elegant,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “But very unhappy. She’s not good at hiding it. Neither are you. Speaking of which, is your stomach better? The irritable syndrome?”

  “Irritable bowel syndrome. Not better, really. I have to have the clips surgically removed from my tubes, and I can’t afford it. I got some money from my father, and I have a tiny bit of savings, but not enough.”

  Heike said, “Weißt du was, you probably have to find a secondary source of income that Madame and Yevgeny don’t know about. Not just because she’ll take the money, but because she’ll never approve of your untying your tubes. I didn’t know that could happen with your intestines. Barbarisch.”

  I was hoarse from all the sotto voce chatter. I said, “All of us girls are prominent in some way, well connected. How can Madame be sure we won’t use our influence to make trouble for her?”

  Heike reached over to the nightstand for her cigarettes and said, “It’s precisely because we are from important families that she has assurance of our discretion.”

  I said, “If you were to run away, leave the country without paying your debt, do you think she’d come after you?”

  “Germans don’t get into debt. That’s not why I’m here, remember? But for you, for that amount of money, she probably would. It’s not hard to find people these days. She seems rather resourceful to me. But maybe you’re really wanting to run away from something else. Like this seeing two men at once; that would make anyone crazy.”

  “Heike…do you think all charming people are secretly cruel?”

  “Cruel, how?”

  “Hard to say exactly, though there was that strange incident at the courtesans’ ball. What do you suppose really happened?”

  “These are hard questions,” Heike said cryptically. She put out her cigarette, turned her back to me, and went back to sleep.

  Less than an hour later, Madame Tartakov began screaming at the top of her lungs. Her childhood operatic training was kicking in full force, sending shock waves through the tips of my nerves and waking me and all the other girls in the house. Everyone scurried out of their rooms and congregated in the third-floor corridor, clad in their array of curlers, cotton moisturizing gloves, and fancy sleepwear. Had Heike not extinguished her cigarette properly and started a fire? But I didn’t smell smoke. Or was I going to get in trouble for letting Jung sleep over? I scrambled to get a defense together in my head.

  Madame Tartakov stood at the end of the corridor closest to the stairwell. She was fierce of expression, and stuck her arm straight up in the air, holding in her hand a piece of paper that looked as though it had been strangled.

  “WHO KNEW ABOUT THIS?” she asked. She could open her eyes very wide, and now they looked as though they might roll out of her skull.

  We all stood silent, terrified. Finally Heike, the brave one, said, “What happened, Madame?”

  Madame thrust the wad of paper into Heike’s hand and crossed her arms across her chest. Heike opened the lavender stationery, which fell apart in her hands, as Madame had ripped it into pieces. Heike bent over and fished the stray scraps of paper from the ground. Holding up the disparate pieces in her hands, she began to read:

  January 16

  Dearest girls, Dearest Madame Tartakov:

  I am so depressed I hardly can live any more. The courtesans’ ball plays again and again in my mind, like new every time. I will find some other way to pay my owe to Madame. I promise it. If you care for my life you will please don’t search for me.

  I will miss all of you.

  Zeynep

  The room was in an uproar over the Turkish girl’s note. There was some confusion as to whether this was a runaway note or a suicide note or both.

  Madame marched up to Justine and tweaked her nose between forefinger and thumb. Justine yelped.

  Madame said, “YOU ARE HER ROOMMATE! YOU KNEW!”

  “No! I didn’t!” cried Justine, whose nose was starting to bleed. “She said nothing to me. She didn’t even pack most of her things. I couldn’t know, Madame.”

  Madame was still seething but seemed to believe Justine. “FIX YOUR NOSEBLEED,” she said, picking up a square box of Kleenex from the demilune table in the hallway and hurling it at Justine. It hit Justine squarely on her already put-upon nose.

  “I’M GOING TO FIND HER,” said Madame.

  “Madame, please be careful how you handle this,” said Heike, again the only person brave enough to speak up. “They do honor killings in Turkey. If you talk to her family about her, they will be obligated to track her down and murder her.”

  Madame’s eyes surveyed us suspiciously. We all nodded to indicate our agreement with Heike, though we really weren’t sure of the facts. Heike would later explain that Zeynep’s family, as a member of the upper class, probably did not engage in this practice. But none of us found this comforting.

  “WE WILL SEE,” said Madame Tartakov, storming down the stairs and into her bedroom. She slammed the door and got on the phone, screaming at her interlocutor in Russian.

  Justine, who had a Kleenex wad protruding from her nostril, began to cry.

  Four days later, Zeynep moved back into the house on Sixty-second Street, and we learned how Madame handled those who did not pay their debts to her.

  Madame had had very little trouble finding Zeynep’s parents in Istanbul, based on information Zeynep had provided on her H1 work visa application. Without disclosing the precise nature of her relationship with Zeynep, Madame asked where she might find the girl. Unaware of anything amiss, Zeynep’s parents innocently informed Madame that their daughter was stopping with a cousin in Chicago, and they provided the phone number.

  Madame called the alarmed Zeynep. Our dear mistress explained that she was required by law to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service that Zeynep had left her employ. Under the terms of Zeynep’s visa, this would mean that she would have to leave the United States within ninety days or face deportation.

  Clever woman, that Madame Tartakov. By sponsoring her girls for work visas, she killed three birds with one stone: the visas made her business appear legitimate; they gave her access to several contact numbers of the girls’ friends and family; and they gave her something to hold over the girls when they threatened to leave. And it was all almost totally legal. She wouldn’t have to get her hands dirty at all; the INS could be far more menacing than she.

  Even so, Zeynep resisted. The phone call ended there.

  The next day, Madame was ostensibly talking on two cell phones at once, holding one to each ear. She had Zeynep on one phone; on the other, she was speaking to a “friend of a friend,” who happened to be standing on the doorstep of Zeynep’s parents’ house in Istanbul.

  “Zeynep,” she said, “my business associate is now going to give a package to your family manservant, whose name is Ercan; right, Zeynep?”

  The package contained video footage of Zeynep’s degradation in the St. Estèphe Hotel room at the courtesans’ ball. It was shot by a hidden Web camera, which had been placed in all the rooms.

  “If you return to me,” Madame told Zeynep, “my associate will not deliver package. He will tell your manservant that he is mistaken, has wrong address.”

  Zeynep acquiesced into one of Madame’s phones; then, on the other phone, Madame instructed her associate to make the excuse and quit the house without leaving the package behind.

  The next day, Zeynep was on a plane from Chicago to New York.

  And here she was. Madame threw a small, joyless party to celebrate Zeynep’s return. No one touched the cake.

  Being very selfish, I was mildly comforted by Zeynep’s story in one regard: as Madame Tartakov’s U.S. citizen, I did not face deportation. As for blackmailing me with a tape, I was paired with a gay man at the courtesans’ ball; there was not much she could do with footage of two people watching television. She had nothing o
n me. Or did she?

  16

  A Very Brief Work History

  “I AM ENTERING the workforce,” I announced one Sunday afternoon at Joshua’s apartment. We had just had a late breakfast of Zabar’s bagels and lox and were on the sofa, my head nestled in his lap as I languidly watched CNBC.

  “I thought you had a job. As a translator,” Joshua said absently, his eyes never straying from his book even as he stroked my hair. He was reading Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime.

  “As you witnessed, that isn’t working out too well for me. No more freelancing. I want a real job.”

  “Great, I think it will be good for you. What brought this on all of a sudden? Trust fund running out?”

  “Something like that. After years of telling me to be conspicuously idle, my father told me the other day to learn a trade; can you believe it? It’s a bit late now, wouldn’t you say? And now I’m royally screwed. I am completely unfit for work. I’ve never held a job for more than a year. Why can’t I have a job like the ones my family has always had? One in which I get paid just because people like having me around. In which it is impossible to measure my achievements. In which I can lie around and look pretty.”

  “That leaves you with only one option,” said Joshua. “Prostitution.”

  I coughed into Joshua’s lap. “Sorry,” I said, straightening myself up.

  “You have an Ivy League degree,” said Joshua. “Surely that compensates for your family’s woeful fall in stature.” His eyes remained fixed on his book. I was so jealous of his books.

  I said, “You, of all people, should know how little that’s worth. What are you going to do with your philosophy Ph.D., do you suppose?”

  “Teach.”

  “And what if you can’t find a university that’s interested in an expert on the sublime?”

  “Then I’ll do something else. Go to law school. Work on a salmon boat.”

  “If you were in Korea a century ago, and from a family like mine, your future would have been assured. You would have been the king’s court philosopher.”

  “What makes you think everyone was so enlightened then? I don’t know much about Korean history, but I’ll bet the king was just as likely to chop off his advisers’ heads as take their advice.”

  “Some kings, perhaps, but not all. My ancestor —” At the word ancestor, Joshua put the book over his face and pretended to snore. I pressed on. “My ancestor, King Sejong the Great, was a true philosopher-king. He commissioned the creation of the Korean alphabet. Someone like you would have been on that committee. I have a picture of him, even.” I pulled a Korean one-thousand-won banknote out of my purse and showed it to him. “That’s him.”

  “Gee, you look just like him,” said Joshua.

  “Obviously that’s a stylized portrait. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. He also invented the telescope.”

  “You’d be abhorrent if you weren’t so damned ridiculous. Now, you’re going to get angry at what I’m about to say, but I’ll say it anyway. You’re quite clever, Judith. That sort of cleverness doesn’t come from a pure bloodline. That’s got to be the result of some p-p-peasant blood mixed in there, somewhere.”

  “Or it could just be I’m descended from lots of really smart people. Anyway, I hate being clever. I really do. Intelligence in a woman, above a certain degree, is a waste. You need only look at my recent history for evidence of this.”

  “Your recent history?” Joshua’s brow furrowed behind his book.

  I’ve been putting my foot in it more and more of late. “What I mean is, my intelligence has rendered me unfit for normal work.”

  “You rendered yourself unfit for work because you said your breeding prohibited it. Don’t you find these excuses exhausting? It would take far less effort just to suck up and deal.”

  “Can’t you just support me? It’s said that two can live as cheaply as one.”

  “Not when one of them is you. Anyway, on my stipend, even just one can’t live as cheaply as one.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Be a mensch.”

  “A ‘mensch’? I though that meant, be a nice person. I am a nice person.”

  “No, you’re not. In any case, its meaning is more general. Be a human being. Do what people do.”

  SO I DID what people did.

  Joshua suggested I go to one of the headhunting agencies that advertised in The New York Times. I chose one that specialized in placing secretaries, as I stood the best chance of not arousing Madame’s or Yevgeny’s suspicions by taking a job that I could leave promptly at five P.M.

  Jobs For All, as the headhunting agency was called, was a tiny, cramped office near Bryant Park. A pear-shaped woman greeted me from her desk; she was picking gum off the bottom of her shoe. “Hi, I’m Jessica Fusshuckster. ’Scuse my feet. I’ll be your headhunter, or, should I say, headhuntrix.” She laughed in a way that sounded like hiccuping. I handed her my résumé. She donned the glasses that were dangling from a chain round her neck and skimmed over the papers. “Okay, lemme see. What type of work are you looking for?”

  “Something with as little responsibility as possible.”

  “Good, that’s all I got. Okay. Your name is Judith Min-Hee Lee. What’s Min-Hee?”

  “It’s my Korean name.”

  “Okay, do we need that on your résumé? Can we take it off and just have it be Judith Lee? Otherwise people will think you’re a foreign national and they’ll think you need an H1 work visa, and they’re not going to even read further.”

  “I’m a U.S. citizen,” I said.

  “I know, dearie, but you know how it is.”

  At that moment, another headhuntrix slammed down her phone, leaped from her desk, and rang a large bell that hung in the middle of the office. It was a big gong-shaped bell, the kind used in boxing rings. Everyone in the office, six all told, applauded thunderously.

  “Are they expecting us to fight?” I asked.

  “No,” said Mrs. Fusshuckster. “We ring the bell when we make a placement. Okay…ooh, look at all these languages. What do you mean when you say, ‘French: Proficient.’ That’s a little vague. Could you take down a phone number in French?”

  “A phone number? Of course.”

  “Well, then, you should have put ‘French: Fluent.’”

  “That’s not fluency.”

  “Don’t undersell yourself like that, dearie. It’s not becoming. Now, your work experience begins with ‘investment bank analyst.’ I’ll change that to ‘secretary.’ We don’t want to price you out of the market. And what did you do as a ‘dame de compagnie’?”

  “I read aloud to an old blind lady.”

  “Could she give a reference?”

  “Probably not, because…she’s…blind.”

  For some reason, Mrs. Fusshuckster accepted this explanation. She continued, “Never mind, then. But, honey, your hair. It’s falling over your face. Pin it up or something.

  “Okay, the other thing is you need to smile more. No one wants a little sourpuss as a colleague, now, do they? And let’s see your handshake. Ewww, I feel like I’m touching a corpse. Let me show you what that feels like. See? Not too pleasant, is it? But not too firm, either. Grip like you’re giving someone a hand job.”

  I put my hand over my mouth in surprise.

  “No need to be so prissy, missy. And those shoes are sling-backs. No good.”

  “These are Bruno Maglis,” I said.

  “Are you going to a cocktail party? Heel and toe must be fully covered.”

  Am I doomed ever after to rely upon permutations of Madame Tartakov for my livelihood?

  “Are you going to ask me to live in your house?” I asked.

  “Huh? What’s the matter with you? You think I’m Eileen Ford or something? Also, your lips are chapped. Use Blistex. And Visine.”

  MRS. FUSSHUCKSTER placed me as a personal assistant to Tamara Harris, the ad sales director of Teengal, the nation’s top-selling magazine for
teenage girls. “This is a plum job,” Mrs. Fusshuckster had said. “If you do well there, the sky’s the limit. You could go on to be personal secretary to the publisher herself.”

  TEENGAL MAGAZINE, WEEK OF FEBRUARY 15:

  Tamara Harris was out on holiday when her supervisor had hired me. I met Tam, as she likes to be called, for the first time when I reported to work Monday morning. I had been sitting at my desk for half an hour when, at nine-fifteen, a hip-wiggling, generously endowed woman in a leather skirt started walking past my desk. She walked back and forth several times, each time stopping to stare and blink her long lashes at me with a vapid smile. Every time this apparition appeared, I smiled and nodded in return, wondering whether she was some village idiot.

  Finally, on the fourth lap past my desk, she said, “You’re not my new assistant, are you?” I answered that I guessed I probably was. She extended her hand forcefully in greeting. We were terrified to behold each other. I had never before been in the presence of a genuine Southern belle. An angry god could not have brought about a bigger mismatch of boss and secretary, but Tam was clearly determined to make me her friend.

  As I discovered over coffee in her office, Tam has one of the few American dialects that betray not only a person’s origin but also her family’s trade. If Daisy from The Great Gatsby had a voice that was “full of money,” then it can also be said that Tamara Harris’s voice is full of tobacco. By this, I do not mean that she is a smoker. She is not. She is, however, descended from seven generations of Carolina tobacco farmers whose income is handsomely guaranteed in that their entire crop is purchased annually by Philip Morris. She has lived in New York for just over a year, having previously worked in the Teengal Atlanta bureau.

  She is quite charming but has a very dolled-up appearance, like Jodie Foster’s child-prostitute character in Taxi Driver. The downy flecks on her lapel, which I had assumed to be dandruff, were actually bits of her face powder. I realized this on Tuesday, when she smiled at me artificially to thank me for coffee, and her face flaked off in a blizzard.